A digital copy of Astonishing X-Men #44 was provided for review by the author. As a lifelong X-Men fan, I have learned that X-Men fans are, and this is putting it kindly, fickle. On top of this, they have an even more abusive relationship with continuity than most other fans of most other superhero comics […]

When Doogie Hower had a blog, it wasn’t connected to the Internet. I don’t know that a lot of the people watching Doogie Howser, M.D. knew what the Internet was or imagine the thing that it would become. It was just a journal, but we knew that it was hipper and more modern that Kevin […]

The haunted house story is a timeless story that is rooted firmly in the economics of its time. One of the persistent lessons of horror is that we are not the masters of our collective domain that we think we are. There are monsters and sharks and mutants that will kill us for our arrogance. […]

1. Every couple of years, a horror creator just flat-out impresses me. The wheel turns, you know, so they always disappoint me eventually, but right now, I am really a fan of Eric Heisserer. He Gets It. He understands the genre, not just in a ‘and then this happens, and then this happens way’, but […]

1. A used U-Haul truck which has been de-identified. The sides and rear door of the truck featured a crude logo made from what appears to be black electrical tape in an irregular, erratic-looking typeface. It read “The Gutter King”. I understand that The Gutter King probably is just a regular guy who cleans gutters […]

I’ve been thinking about Occupy Wall Street quite a bit over the past three weeks. I’ve been avoiding writing a post about it because I don’t want to ramble on incessantly or get to the spot where I start digressing on a dozen angry tangents. The most interesting thing about the movement – I think […]

As a disillusioned liberal, I choose not to believe that the President of the United States is weak-willed or a sell-out or wholly lacking somehow in political acumen, as I have heard many opine. Instead, I choose to believe that he is kind of like Josh Baskin from the movie Big or the girl from […]

Let’s say that you have a skillet. You get some potatoes and you turn them into hash browns. Then you chunk up some Taylor ham or Canadian bacon. and throw that in the skillet. Then throw a few eggs on top of it. But Jeff, you’re saying, that’s basically just a frittata. And you’re right, […]

As I have taken on more and more design work, it seems more and more apparent to me that the clients that I work with all expect me to be a kind of Dumbledore, able to somehow willwork the impossible into possibility when their requests flagrantly fly in the face of common sense. My wand […]

I thought that Justice League #1 was not the sort of book that you’d want to use to wow new readers. But I’m not a new reader. I’m a very old reader, having read comics now for nearly 30 years (I started very young). I am not the target demo here, and frankly that’s as […]